On a particular and particularly rocky stretch of a road, a fight was breaking out, or maybe a discussion.
“Are not.”
“Am so.”
“Are not.”
“Am so.”
The participants collected themselves for a moment to consider their options; the debate was becoming too technical and abstract. A grounded, fully-developed statement was needed.
“You are NOT the most disagreeable of all of us pebbles. I’m much spikier than you.”
“Well I say I AM the most disagreeable of all us pebbles, because even if you’re spikier I’m pleasingly irregular – I can’t sit still against someone’s foot, I’ve got to rock and roll my way around and mess them up heart and sole. I’d take any bet you can name that I’m the most disagree, unpleasant, nasty piece of pebbly business ever to chip off the old block, and I dare you to bet me right now or give up your case.”
“Fine,” said the dissenting pebble. “Listen: an extremely holy and enlightened man is walking down this road. In five minutes, he’s going to step on us. I dare you to hop into his shoe. If you can drive him nuts, I’ll accept your idiot claims to being the most disagreeable, unpleasant, and generally shitty pebble to ever exist.”
And the candidate for that title was pleased, and so the bet was struck.
Five minutes later the holy man came walking down the rocky road, head down, mind above. He was yet holier still than the dissenting pebble had described; just looking at him was like taking a valium. Even the disagreeable pebble felt itself soften a little as his feet approached, but it had a job to do and it knew it. It shook its pebbly head, shrugged its pebbly shoulders, thought of its reputation, and leapt into the holy man’s shoe with the force of a thunderbolt covered in prickly thorns.
The holy man hop, skip, tripped and nearly tumbled down the sloping road, but he caught himself on a little tree and continued apace, unflinching.
“Right,” said the disagreeable pebble. “Time to work.”
And it did.
It worked itself through epidermis and into raw red flesh.
It spun and nudged and whirled and gyrated like a weasel in a war dance.
It sang all the correct pebble songs, such as ‘I’m shifting from toe to toe’ and ‘your heel is a fiery land of pain.’
Soon, very soon, the holy man stopped his walk to mop his brow and have some water. A passerby stopped for a quickie blessing and asked precisely where he was travelling.
“To the sea,” said the holy man. “There’s a holy place there, so it’s very much necessary.”
“That’s a long walk,” said the passerby.
“Oh, that’s not too much of a problem,” said the holy man. “Discomfort is fleeting.”
And he smiled when he said that, and the disagreeable pebble cursed and began to plan the next angle of attack.
For the first hundred miles, the disagreeable pebble rolled constantly from ridge to ridge, never resting, always moving. It left no inch of flesh unjabbed, no callus unshredded.
The holy man hummed holy things to himself as he walked those hundred miles, and those things passed, and the pebble swore and planned again.
For the next hundred miles, the disagreeable pebble sat still, rock still, stone still, immobilized and unyielding as it slowly ate through a single spot in the holy man’s heel until it was practically lodged against his bones.
The holy man sang holy songs to the wind and the birds as he walked those hundred miles, and that thing passed too, and the pebble snarled to itself and planned again.
For the final hundred miles the disagreeable pebble went mad and struggled on top of the holy man’s foot and attacked its soft skin like a rabid dog, worrying and chewing at it with flinty teeth until it looked like he’d gone dancing in a rosebush.
And the holy man stopped, and the disagreeable pebble rejoiced at first, but then it realized they were at the sea, in all its vast blue, and the holy man had only stopped because he had succeeded in his journey.
“Damnation and rubble,” mourned the disagreeable pebble. “I was so close!”
“Not as far as you thought, for sure,” said the holy man. “But farther than you would’ve liked to hope.”
The disagreeable pebble was greatly surprised by this interjection into its private thoughts, and said so.
“Everything talks, and I’ve tried to learn how to listen,” said the holy man. He fished the disagreeable pebble from his abused shoe and held it on his palm. “This is far too big a world for any of us to not learn to get along with all sorts of neighbours. Look! Look at how big it is! Look at the sea!”
And the disagreeable pebble looked at the vast and briny water under its huge sky and was humbled as pie.
“I’m sorry,” said the disagreeable pebble. “I’ve been presumptuous and petty, and caused you pain because of my own small insecurities. Will you forgive me, holy man?”
“Sure,” said the holy man. “Be seeing you.”
And then he overarm chucked the pebble out into the sea, where it skipped seventeen times at increasing velocity before sinking.
The first thousand years the pebble spent screaming. It was a shocking thing for a small pebble from the backroad countryside, to find itself immersed in the deeps.
The second thousand years it spent swearing vengeance as it crawled its way along the ocean floor, buffeted by currents, hurled about by the grinding of the great tectonic plates, insulted by slimy things with bony fins.
The third thousand years the pebble spent getting warmer, hotter, faster as it boiled with fury and also increasing heat as it dropped down back into the earth.
Finally, as its prized ridges melted off, as its perfectly irregular and torturous surface was crushed into a layer so thin that it didn’t exist, the pebble understood.
It understood it was not a pebble, but a particle. An undifferentiated one.
It understood that it had always been this way, and only its own ignorance had kept it so small, so focused on itself.
It understood that it and all that it had just joined were one.
And at that moment, at the pinnacle of its scope, it understood that it remembered the holy man’s voice extremely clearly, along with every one of the seventeen times it had skipped across the water.
And this is how we get earthquakes.